Bridgewater State University to face federal discrimination lawsuit in day care rape case

Tuesday

Oct 31, 2017 at 4:57 PMNov 1, 2017 at 6:20 AM

Boston lawyer Carmen Durso, who is part of a team representing the families of victims, said the claim will allege that university administrators did not take appropriate steps to protect the victims of a former student-teacher convicted of child rape from sexual abuse as soon as they became aware that there was a problem.

Tom Relihan The Enterprise TMRelihan_ENT

BRIDGEWATER – A pair of lawyers representing the families of victims of Kyle P. Loughlin, a former student at Bridgewater State University convicted of raping multiple young children at the university’s former on-site day care, plan to file a federal discrimination complaint against the university.

Boston lawyers Carmen Durso and Kathy Jo Cook, who represent the families of five of the victims, told a judge in Suffolk Superior Court on Tuesday that they plan to amend a civil lawsuit they have been pursuing since 2015 to include a formal complaint under Title IX, a federal law designed to protect individuals from sexual and gender-based discrimination in education.

Durso said the claim will allege that university administrators did not take appropriate steps to protect Loughlin’s victims from sexual abuse as soon as they became aware that there was a problem. They expect to file the complaint within the next month.

In the original lawsuit, Durso and Cook sought documents related to the series of sexual assaults that happened in the day care center and how the university’s administration handled the incidents. The state Attorney General, who is defending the university in the case, attempted to have it dismissed, but a judge ordered the documents to be turned over to the lawyers under a protective order earlier this year.

Durso and Cook told Judge Joseph Leighton that they were subsequently provided with a significant number of documents, a review of which led them to believe the university had violated Title IX.

A Bridgewater State University spokesperson and a spokesperson from the AG’s office both declined to comment on the amended complaint Tuesday.

Durso said he expects other families of victims will also be brought in as plaintiffs.

“It makes more sense to have all of them involved in one lawsuit,” he said.

The case centers on a series of incidents in the spring of 2015 in which student-teachers at the day care center, which has since been shut down, came to Judith Ritacco, the day care’s former director, with concerns that another student-teacher may have been engaging in sexual misconduct with some of the young children who attended the center.

Ritacco, court testimony showed, told the student-teachers not to say anything about their concerns and then waited weeks to report the issue to her supervisors. She pleaded guilty in September to charges of reckless endangerment of a child, failing to report suspected child abuse as a mandated reporter and witness intimidation. She was sentenced to three years’ probation, and the judge did not issue a guilty finding. Her case will be dismissed if she does not violate her probation. She’s also barred from holding a supervisory position in any facility that cares for children.

Loughlin, meanwhile, was arrested by campus police following an investigation and pleaded guilty in March to two counts of rape and abuse of a child, three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 and one count of larceny. He was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in jail followed by a decade of probation.

Since the incident, The Enterprise has attempted to clarify the timeline of who in the university’s administration knew what, and when. The paper was assessed a $60,000 fee to produce records sought through one public records request, and earlier this year received heavily redacted e-mails in response to a second request.